A public typography produced by the collective l’Endroit indiqué and FOFA Gallery (Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University). Paraguayan Sea is a text intervention by Montreal visual artist Andrew Forster in collaboration with Montreal poet Erín Moure. This graphic and typographic artwork in a mix of three languages—French, English and Guaraní—relays Moure’s poetic translation into Frenglish and Guaraní of the novela in Portunhol and Guaraní, Mar Paraguayo, by Brazilian writer Wilson Bueno. Guaraní is one of the original languages of Paraguay and surrounding regions. Bueno’s Mar Paraguayo is written in a hybrid of three languages. Moure’s translation maintains the Guaraní and allows Bueno’s Portunol to slide between English and French. The typographic font (Iguana) was designed specifically for this piece.

The piece questions if it is possible to turn rigorous and complex creative practices (such as art) outwards towards public space—like a skin turned inside out. How does this viscera of poetic language compete with the instrumental syntax of advertising and branding on the street? The text is not bilingual or trilingual but, rather, moves in and out of three different languages making one meaning. As such, it reflects not an official politics or policy of language but a lived and creative amalgam of language and meaning reflective of the creative ‘mix’ that is Montreal’s urban hybridity.

A discussion with Erín and Andrew on public art and translation will take place at FOFA in November.

Wilson Bueno (Jaguapita, Paraná, Brazil, 1949—Curitiba, Brazil 2010) was well-known in Brazil, and wrote several books fundamental to contemporary Brazilian literature, such as: Bolero’s Bar (1986), Manual de Zoofilia (1991), Cristal (1995), Pequeño Tratado de Brinquedo” (1996), Jardim Zoológico (1999), A Cavalo (2000), Amar-te a ti nem sei se com Carícias (2004) and Cachorros do Céu (2005). His Mar Paraguayo (1992) is a special case, the only work of Bueno written in a mixture of three languages: Portuguese and Spanish (or Portunhol) and Guaraní. The first editoin of Mar Paraguayo was published in 1992 in Brazil by Iluminaras, with a prologue by Néstor Perlongher. The book was republished in its original version in Chile, (Intemperie, 2001); Argentina (Tse-Tsé, 2005) and in Mexico (Bonobos, 2006). Montreal writer and translator Erín Moure is completing a translation into Frenglish (leaving the Guaraní) for publication in the USA, so that this magnificent text can be read in the north of the Americas.

—

Erín Moure In 2016, poet Erín Moure published translations from French of François Turcot’s My Dinosaur, and from Galician of Chus Pato’s Flesh of Leviathan and Rosalía de Castro’s New Leaves. A 40-year retrospective of her own poetry, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetryof Erín Moure , edited by Shannon Maguire (Wesleyan University Press), appeared in spring 2017. Her translation from Brazilian Portunhol into Montreal Frenglish of Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea (Nightboat Books) will appear in October, 2017, and in Galicia, her translation of Antón Lopo’s biography of Uxío Novoneyra, Distance of the Wolf (Novoneyra Foundation), will be published in June. Moure holds two honorary doctorates for her contribution to poetry, Brandon University (2008) and Universidade de Vigo in Spain (2016). As the Woodberry Poetry Room Fellow for 2016-2017 at Harvard University, she spent nine days in April listening to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Muriel Rukseyer, and reading that of Angelina Weld Grimké, in preparation for creating a new poetic work on migration, asthma, and women.

Andrew Forster lives in Montreal. His work includes installation, video, performance, live public events and other collaborative and cross-disciplinary projects. His current work centers on video-video installation of movement-based performance shown in visual art and dance venues, and text-installations for public space. Forster’s past work includes a performance for 75 people entitled En masse with choreographer Suzanne Miller (Tangente, Montreal); Ossip, and a dance performance based on the poetry of Ossip Mandelstam (coproduction OVertigo/Tangente). He has done several performance-based works for public space including Cinéma (Société des arts technologiques), a multi-media piece with live performance and live-mixed audio taking place outdoors in Place de la paix for an audience seated indoors looking out through SAT’s storefront windows.He has also participated as an artist in several design competitions for public space, including the winning proposal in a competition for a new entrance to Place des Arts, Montreal (with architects Atelier Big City) and a competition for a video projection on the new Wilder Espace Danse in Montreal (2017).

one dusk après une autre I sit ici on this sofa diagonal to the window, and in sitting it’s presque as if everything’s crumbling into bits: cramps in the guts: setting sun weaving humid nuances: spaces from où move déjà les occupations cérémoniales of light and lune: between the crowns of sombreros or entre les durs vides of the fig tree that devastate into shadow and suspicion in the crépuscule of the sea resort: figuier, couronne, sombreros: la ancestral speech of fathers and grands-pères that infinitely vanishes into memory, they entertain all speech et tricot: these Guaraní voices simplement eternalize as they go on weaving: ñandu: there is no better fabric than the web des feuilles tissées all together, ñándu, together and between the arabesques that, symphonique, interweave, checkerboard of green and bird et chant, in the happy amble of a freedom: ñanduti: ñandurenimbó:

—

Paraguayan Sea Soup

original introduction to Mar Paraguayo by Néstor Perlonguer, São Paulo, 1992, translated and intertweeted from Spanish by Erín Moure

Paraguayan Sea, by Wilson Bueno, is an exceptional event, of the kind that are usually so quiet they are almost imperceptible, detected only by those in the know. But once they happen, it’s as if they were always meant to exist. Everything’s the same yet, subtly, all is altered. The event pokes holes in our habits, and in the rhythms of the cosmos; its perturbations are tinged with an indescribable glint of the irreversible, of the definitive.

In this case, the event involves the invention of a language. Imitation and invention, says Gabriel Tarde, are the greatest of human passions (practices). Maybe it was Wilson Bueno who actually “invented” Portunhol (a Portunhol dappled with Guaraní which deploys from beneath, in the pulsing marrow of the language, something Argentinian—or Correntine— poet Francisco Madariaga invoked from above in his luxuriously humidly surrealist gaucho-Bedouin-Afro-Hispanic-Guaraní) or else, from his artistic Altazor, Bueno plucked it out, or snitched it from small talk, warm bowl in hand and the gringa keeping the maté topped up from the pot, outside behind the kitchen in wicker chairs in the yard. He grabbed it in Spanish and Portuguese, let it enter one ear without it escaping the other. It might seem a stretch but Wilson Bueno has something of Manuel Puig, whose writings, based in conversation, also shoot the breeze, and something of the commentator as well, because he absorbs then broadcasts in a common parlance. For almost all Hispano-Americans in Brazil express themselves in an inconsistent, precarious and fickle mix of languages.

This mixture, well entrenched, is not structured as a predetermined code of signification; it’s faithful only to its own capriciousness, deviance and error.

Portunhol is immediately poetic. Between the two major languages, there’s a vacillation, a tension, a constant oscillation: one is, at once, the “error” of the other and its possible destiny, uncertain and improbable. A singular fascination arises from this clash of deviances (as a linguist with a legal bent might say). There’s no rule of law: there’s grammar but it’s unruly; there’s orthography, but it’s erratic: chuva and lluvia in Spanish and Portuguese (spelled whichever way) coexist in the same paragraph, to mention but one of innumerable examples.

As aberrant mixture, Paraguayan Sea is akin to Paraguayan soup, a dish that, contrary to expectations, does not invite a soup spoon, but is a kind of sui generis omelet or corn bread. The waves of the Sea are tottering: who knows where they’ll topple, they lack harbour and itinerary; everything in them bobs in baroque suspension between prose and poetry, becoming-animal and becoming-woman.

Out of the breadth of this blooming Paraguayan Sea—which recalls a schoolchild’s epic poem by Esteban Echeverría, “incommensurable, open and mysterious from head to toe”—poetry catches us, leaps on us like a puppy—the microscopic Brinks—sometimes playful, sometimes savage. Perhaps it is poetry, for it appears—some critics would say—casually, without determination in the indeterminate.

A continual hilarity, unprovoked and born naturally from the linguistic amalgam, marks Bueno’s disquieting text. An avant-garde experience, the text can be compared to Catatau by Paulo Leminski (significantly, also from Parana) and, even more daringly, to Julián Ríos’s Larva: they all play with language, inventing and reinventing it. But whereas Catatau rests on the high culture that impregnates its subtext despite collapses, destructions and reconstructions, Bueno’s book is founded on a pathetic burst of laughter, the tragi-comedy of everyday agonies incarnated in the slippage of languages, one of those tragic soap operas that ends badly if at all, though one with more density, depth: it may seem entertaining but is no entertainment.

The merit of Paraguayan Sea lies precisely in the microscopic and molecular labour within its galloping inter-languages (or inter-rivers), within its indeterminations which function as a minor language (to echo Deleuze and Guattari) that mines the preposterous majesty of major languages, through which it wanders as if without intention, without system, completely untimely and surprising, like good poetry, never predictable. The tale is like Bueno’s Guaratuban doll-face who, in giving her dog kilometrically diminutive nicknames (blossoms plucked from Guaraní that irrupt to intensify the poetic temperature of the tale), extends the microscopia of its canine grandeur, to attract and seduce us with the motion of its bifurcated tail, as if it were mermaid pretending to be manatee, or manatee mimicking mermaid, until the sprinkled glitter of its scaly tail drowns us in the irridescent ecstasy of a vast, deep sea.

How, finally, to read Paraguayan Sea? Those with an obsession for plot (which exists but its matter is indecisive and entangled, given its porous composition) who ignore the poetic evolutions and mutations of its language will miss out, like those readers of (badly) translated pulp novels who gravitate toward half-digested plot resumés. Paraguayan Sea may be a torrid tale, but it can’t be turned into a tweet!

“I have been dwelling on “sehnsucht,” a German word which hardly has any equivalent in another language: desire/longing, aspiration/nostalgie, anhelo/ansia/nostalgia? “Sehnsucht” to me is a strong drive for making art. Using old, time-consuming, manual craft techniques to create objects made of found material—such as human hair—I often encounter the word “nostalgia” when my work is described. But it is more about the stories and experiences behind the material. It is about the constant change, the unpredictable nature and experiencing of the past and time itself. I get in touch with the images and stories within a material or space by tearing it apart and sewing or felting it anew together again. So what does “sehnsucht” mean in that context? What do I long for? As an artist? As female, human? mondkuchen – tomorrow’s touch shows an approach-in-progress to this question.”

Mirjam Elburn has a diploma in fine arts from HBKSaar in Saarbrücken and a master’s in art history, modern history and economic & social history from the University of Saarbrücken (Germany). She lives in Siegen, Germany. [mirjamelburn.wordpress.com]

l’Endroit indiqué presents a new work by Andrew Forster. This urban video installation occupies an elastic fabric tube cutting the corner between two windows. Viewed from the street, Drift is a long slow pan along the shoreline of a lake in Algonquin Park. Shot from a canoe on a sleepy summer’s day. Video visible from nightfall, installation all the time.

Visite d’ouverture : samedi 29 octobre, 5 à 7

In my drawing and painting practice I explore themes within social history, natural history and ecology while considering painting’s history as a vehicle for expressive, affective communication. Through painterly methods that entail a loss of control, and that both embrace and resist technical ‘mastery’, representation is obscured. The worldly objects represented reside in a space of ‘not really knowing’, in the process of dissolving or appearing.

My Blue Marble paintings are based on one of the most widely distributed photographs of all time, taken in 1972 by the astronauts of Apollo 17, the last manned lunar mission. It is one of the few photographs to show the entire earth, with the sun conveniently lighting the face of planet Earth and with Antarctica at the top as the astronauts saw it. Rare, because it was taken by the human hand (subsequent photographs of the entire planet are usually composites from unmanned satellites), this iconic photograph has been widely used by environmental organizations to show the earth as isolated, beautiful, and vulnerable. Yet, humans are, and have long been, looking for an Earth-like twin. For l’Endroit indiqué, Blue Marble is painted directly on the window, with gaps that allow viewers to peer inside. Layering of paint invites sensations of depth, suspension, and relief.

Dagmar Dahle is an artist living in Lethbridge, Alberta. Solo exhibitions include Weaving Van Gogh (Akau 2006, Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery 2008, Stride Gallery 2010); Lost.Bird.Collecting (Southern Alberta Art Gallery 2006). Group exhibitions include ANIMAL (Museum London 2011); On Your Marks (Southern Alberta Art Gallery 2010); senselikeblueplace (Trianon Gallery, Lethbridge, 2014). Dagmar’s poetic prose piece Painting John Brown Painting, on the work of Toronto painter John Brown, was published in Ars Medica, a journal of medicine the arts and humanities in Spring 2010. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Lethbridge.

This piece brings together a series of images produced, and culled from my worktable. Initially existing in various medias, they have been assembled to now occupy these windows as printing. They are prints amongst things, seen as one walks by on the street. This is an aspect of art that interests me, its placement amongst other objects. These PDF (portable document format) are printed for the passer by. This work is one of correspondence with the works of two poets, Emily Dickinson, and Susan Howe. Travelling texts, through land, and through time.

I mourn this morning, Susie, that I have no sweet sunset to gild a page for you, nor any bay so blue – not even a chamber way up in the sky, as your’s is, to give me thoughts of heaven, which I would give to you. You know I must write you, down, down, in the terrestrial; no sunset here, no stars; not even a bit of twilight which I may poeticize – and send you! Yet Susie, there will be romance in the letter ride to you – think of the hills and the dales, and the rivers it will pass over, and the drivers and conductors who will hurry it on to you; and wont that make a poem such as can ne’ver be written? [Emily Dickinson]

Charles Gagnon is an interdisciplinary artist, and a teacher. His work is concerned with the senses, principally the sonorous and the tactile of things. The work is often shown in public space such as a library, a hallway, and a record store.

From August 2014 until the rains bear it away, writer Erín Moure joins forces with artist Andrew Forster to wrap the window-gallery L’endroit indiqué and its building with magnificent text in Frenglish and Guaraní taken from her translation of the late Brazilian writer Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea.

Wilson Bueno (Jaguapita, Paraná, Brazil, 1949—Curitiba, Brazil 2010) was well-known in Brazil, and wrote several books fundamental to contemporary Brazilian literature, such as: Bolero’s Bar (1986), Manual de Zoofilia (1991), Cristal (1995), Pequeño Tratado de Brinquedo” (1996), Jardim Zoológico (1999), A Cavalo (2000), Amar-te a ti nem sei se com Carícias (2004) and Cachorros do Céu (2005). His Mar Paraguayo (1992) is a special case, the only work of Bueno written in a mixture of three languages: Portuguese and Spanish (or Portunhol) and Guaraní. The first editoin of Mar Paraguayo was published in 1992 in Brazil by Iluminaras, with a prologue by Néstor Perlongher. The book was republished in its original version in Chile, (Intemperie, 2001); Argentina (Tse-Tsé, 2005) and in Mexico (Bonobos, 2006). Montreal writer and translator Erín Moure is completing a translation into Frenglish (leaving the Guaraní) for publication in the USA, so that this magnificent text can be read in the north of the Americas.

Erín Moure is a poet, translator, editor, collaborator, essayist, cyclist and cook. She lives in Montreal and works all over. Her languages are English, French, and Galician and she normally translates into English; from her knowledge of Galician, she is also able to translate from Castilian Spanish and Portuguese. Her most recent book is Insecession, published in 2014 by BookThug in one voluem with her translation of Secession by Chus Pato.

one dusk après une autre I sit ici on this sofa diagonal to the window, and in sitting it’s presque as if everything’s crumbling into bits: cramps in the guts: setting sun weaving humid nuances: spaces from où move déjà les occupations cérémoniales of light and lune: between the crowns of sombreros or entre les durs vides of the fig tree that devastate into shadow and suspicion in the crépuscule of the sea resort: figuier, couronne, sombreros: la ancestral speech of fathers and grands-pères that infinitely vanishes into memory, they entertain all speech et tricot: these Guaraní voices simplement eternalize as they go on weaving: ñandu: there is no better fabric than the web des feuilles tissées all together, ñándu, together and between the arabesques that, symphonique, interweave, checkerboard of green and bird et chant, in the happy amble of a freedom: ñanduti: ñandurenimbó:

—

Paraguayan Sea Soup

original introduction by Néstor Perlonguer, São Paulo, 1992, translated and intertweeted from Spanish by Erín Moure

Paraguayan Sea, by Wilson Bueno, is an exceptional event, of the kind that are usually so quiet they are almost imperceptible, detected only by those in the know. But once they happen, it’s as if they were always meant to exist. Everything’s the same yet, subtly, all is altered. The event pokes holes in our habits, and in the rhythms of the cosmos; its perturbations are tinged with an indescribable glint of the irreversible, of the definitive.

In this case, the event involves the invention of a language. Imitation and invention, says Gabriel Tarde, are the greatest of human passions (practices). Maybe it was Wilson Bueno who actually “invented” Portunhol (a Portunhol dappled with Guaraní which deploys from beneath, in the pulsing marrow of the language, something Argentinian—or Correntine— poet Francisco Madariaga invoked from above in his luxuriously humidly surrealist gaucho-Bedouin-Afro-Hispanic-Guaraní) or else, from his artistic Altazor, Bueno plucked it out, or snitched it from small talk, warm bowl in hand and the gringa keeping the maté topped up from the pot, outside behind the kitchen in wicker chairs in the yard. He grabbed it in Spanish and Portuguese, let it enter one ear without it escaping the other. It might seem a stretch but Wilson Bueno has something of Manuel Puig, whose writings, based in conversation, also shoot the breeze, and something of the commentator as well, because he absorbs then broadcasts in a common parlance. For almost all Hispano-Americans in Brazil express themselves in an inconsistent, precarious and fickle mix of languages.

This mixture, well entrenched, is not structured as a predetermined code of signification; it’s faithful only to its own capriciousness, deviance and error.

Portunhol is immediately poetic. Between the two major languages, there’s a vacillation, a tension, a constant oscillation: one is, at once, the “error” of the other and its possible destiny, uncertain and improbable. A singular fascination arises from this clash of deviances (as a linguist with a legal bent might say). There’s no rule of law: there’s grammar but it’s unruly; there’s orthography, but it’s erratic: chuva and lluvia in Spanish and Portuguese (spelled whichever way) coexist in the same paragraph, to mention but one of innumerable examples.

As aberrant mixture, Paraguayan Sea is akin to Paraguayan soup, a dish that, contrary to expectations, does not invite a soup spoon, but is a kind of sui generis omelet or corn bread. The waves of the Sea are tottering: who knows where they’ll topple, they lack harbour and itinerary; everything in them bobs in baroque suspension between prose and poetry, becoming-animal and becoming-woman.

Out of the breadth of this blooming Paraguayan Sea—which recalls a schoolchild’s epic poem by Esteban Echeverría, “incommensurable, open and mysterious from head to toe”—poetry catches us, leaps on us like a puppy—the microscopic Brinks—sometimes playful, sometimes savage. Perhaps it is poetry, for it appears—some critics would say—casually, without determination in the indeterminate.

A continual hilarity, unprovoked and born naturally from the linguistic amalgam, marks Bueno’s disquieting text. An avant-garde experience, the text can be compared to Catatau by Paulo Leminski (significantly, also from Parana) and, even more daringly, to Julián Ríos’s Larva: they all play with language, inventing and reinventing it. But whereas Catatau rests on the high culture that impregnates its subtext despite collapses, destructions and reconstructions, Bueno’s book is founded on a pathetic burst of laughter, the tragi-comedy of everyday agonies incarnated in the slippage of languages, one of those tragic soap operas that ends badly if at all, though one with more density, depth: it may seem entertaining but is no entertainment.

The merit of Paraguayan Sea lies precisely in the microscopic and molecular labour within its galloping inter-languages (or inter-rivers), within its indeterminations which function as a minor language (to echo Deleuze and Guattari) that mines the preposterous majesty of major languages, through which it wanders as if without intention, without system, completely untimely and surprising, like good poetry, never predictable. The tale is like Bueno’s Guaratuban doll-face who, in giving her dog kilometrically diminutive nicknames (blossoms plucked from Guaraní that irrupt to intensify the poetic temperature of the tale), extends the microscopia of its canine grandeur, to attract and seduce us with the motion of its bifurcated tail, as if it were mermaid pretending to be manatee, or manatee mimicking mermaid, until the sprinkled glitter of its scaly tail drowns us in the irridescent ecstasy of a vast, deep sea.

How, finally, to read Paraguayan Sea? Those with an obsession for plot (which exists but its matter is indecisive and entangled, given its porous composition) who ignore the poetic evolutions and mutations of its language will miss out, like those readers of (badly) translated pulp novels who gravitate toward half-digested plot resumés. Paraguayan Sea may be a torrid tale, but it can’t be turned into a tweet!

I am writing this with due respect and heartful of tears since we have not known or met ourselves previously. This letter must come to you as a surprise, but I believe it is only a day that people meet and become great friends and business partners. I am pleased to get across to you for a very urgent and profitable business proposal. I also want to invest the fund under your care because I am ignorant of business world. I am in a sincere desire of your humble assistance. Your suggestions and ideas will be highly regarded. Now permit me to ask these few questions:

1. Can you honestly help me from your heart?

2. Can I completely trust you?

3. What percentage of the total money will be appreciateable by you?

___________

Vida Simonis from Montreal and studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. Herwork has been presented internationally, in a wide range of contexts – galleries, hotel rooms, storefronts, theatres, rooftops, a former synagogue, an old horse stable, and most recently in an old house on Fogo Island, Newfoundland with the piece TO MAKE ENDS MEET. Other recent projects include performances at the ZAZ Festival of Performance Art (Israel), Interakcje (Poland), and exhibitions at At Home Gallery (Slovakia), Einheit 1 (Germany), and Oboro (Montreal). In 2014 she will show her work in Germany and Iran. Vida’s work incorporates various media combined to form site-responsive installations and performances. A running thread throughout her work is drawing: a form that most directly expresses her interests in visual storytelling, improvisation, and elemental materials. Whether through miniature handmade objects or fragments found in nature, her work often draws attention to the detail, the intimate, the ephemeral. As an extension of her practice, she often collaborates with other artists and leads art workshops.

“When I turned the image towards itself this repetition opened time into simultaneity – at once it (the image) is in the past, the imagined future, and the perpetually suspended moment which could be now.” – KW

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Kendra Wallace lives and works in Montréal, Québec and in Le Fresse, France. She studied at NSCAD (BFA) and UQAM (MFA). For Wallace, photography reflects on the phenomena of repetition that it introduces within the gesture of seeing. Wallace focuses on the fluctuating and transitory nature of the visual, pursuing subtle plays belonging to the contradictory relationship of permanence and impermanence. Her works have been presented most recently at Deluge Contemporary Art in Victoria, BC, and group exhibitions in Montréal at Galerie Simon Blais, and at HBKSaar in Germany.

This year Portes ouvertes Design-Montreal coincides with the launch of the online art and design journal MENLO PARK. Edited by Montreal artist and designer Andrew Forster Menlo Park is dedicated to a conversation in the collision space of art, design, architecture and landscape.

in the first issue:Stephen Horne on Hal Foster’s Art-Architecture ComplexGregory Caicco on Saint Francis of Assisi, performance artist and architect
Grace McQuilten on The Social Studio and Takashi Murakami’s meaning of the nonsense of meaningAndre Jodoin on practical knowledge for art and design
Patricio Davilla on criticality and design
Vito Acconci on walking through time, Mur Island and building on the dump (interview by Andrew Forster)

As for you, you proudly claim that you come in pursuit of bandits, but to all the people you have visited you are the bandit. You took Lydia; you over-ran Syria; you are in control of Persia; you have the Bactrians in your power; you have set your course for India. Now you are stretching out your greedy, insatiable hands toward our flocks. Why do you need riches? They merely stimulate your craving for more. You are the first man ever to have created hunger by having too much – so that the more you have the keener your desire for what you do not have. Do you not realise how long you have been delayed around Bactria? While you have been subjugating the Bactrians, the Sogdians have commenced hostilities. In your case victory spawns further war. No matter how far you surpass others in power and strength, the fact remains that nobody wants a foreign master.

L’Endroit indiqué welcomes a series of ambient projects to be viewed from the street: a collaboration between Anne Cormier and Randy Cohen of Atelier Big City, Architects and artist Andrew Forster (curator).